So how does WordPress generate the feeds for your blog?
By default WordPress gives you some settings related to syndication. Here’s a screenshot of these settings:
The first option sets how many feed items your feeds page should show. Pretty straightforward stuff.
The next radio buttons let you decide whether your feed should show a summary of your post or the full content.
When you enable only the summary, WordPress will only populate the <description> tag in the resulting RSS XML file.
When you enable the full text option, WordPress will populate the <description> and the <content> tags in the RSS output.
You’re probably asking how WordPress generates the text for the <description> tag. Good question. First it checks whether you have created any manual excerpts and uses those. If no manual excerpts are found, it will use the get_the_excerpt() function which in turn uses the wp_trim_excerpt() function to return a summary of 55 words. If the string is less than 55 words, then the content will be returned as is.
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